Growing fantasy legions pump up NFL combine appeal

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - As many as 12 million viewers will tune into the NFL combine at some point to watch draft prospects do nothing more exciting than run sprints and lift weights.

Other than coaches, general managers and scouts, who makes time in the middle of the day to devote to projecting a kid's future?

The answer won't surprise anybody with a fantasy football team. For them, the combine has become must-see TV.

Ryan Satterlof, a fifth-grade Indianapolis math teacher and fantasy devotee, was among 600 fans watching Saturday's workouts at Lucas Oil Stadium. Select groups of fans have been invited to the combine workouts since 2012, and only about 1,000 will get the chance this year.

"The NFL handed out forms if we wanted to chart times and stuff," he said. "But I was just trying to take in the moment. ... I won't make any serious judgments - even on players I saw here - until after the draft."

The combine and fantasy football were low-key endeavors when Satterlof, now 37, and a few high school buddies organized their first fantasy league in 1994.

"We used to have to comb through newspapers and other publications to play back then," he said. "Now, everything is at your fingertips."

That's not a coincidence. The explosive growth in the audience for both has gone hand in hand. The combine has nearly doubled its audience since 2007. The number of fantasy competitors, meanwhile, is expected to top 30 million this year, but more impressive is how many have become serious players.

According to Nielsen's annual "Year in Sports" report, the number of daily fantasy football players climbed to 5.1 million last year - up nearly 500 percent from 2013. The number who track their teams and compete on mobile devices is up to three million, an even more-astonishing 847 percent year-over-year jump. Nielsen attributes the growth in mobile to just two outlets that feature daily games - FanDuel and DraftKings.

Men in their mid-30s and early-40s (estimates put the number of women competing at between 10-20 percent) with disposable income make up the core audience for both the combine and fantasy. That correlation is never clearer than when quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers - the key point-producers for fantasy teams - go through their paces at the combine.

Last year, Nielsen research tracked a 30 percent spike in combine viewership to the moment when then-Texas A&M and current Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel took the field. One of the other most-watched moments at the combine came when Michael Sam, the former Missouri defensive end attempting to become the first openly gay player to make it in the NFL, held a news conference.

"The hubbub - over everything that happens here - is so much more than what I went through in 1987," recalled Rich Gannon, an 18-year NFL veteran now working as a radio host for Sirius XM. "And it's still not an ideal situation. For me, as a quarterback, trying to throw in an empty stadium was tough. It messes with your depth perception. I wish there had been even a few people in the stands, the way they do it now."

The combine began in 1982 as a way to save teams from traveling around the country to scout prospects. But it didn't earn a spot on most fans' sports calendar until 2004, when the fledgling NFL Network showed a handful of highlights during a one-hour studio show. This year, the network will beam 45 hours of live programming.

And just as Manziel moved the meter in 2014, look for highly regarded QB prospects Marcus Mariota of Oregon and Jameis Winston of Florida State, who were matched in the Rose Bowl, to be the stars this year. Another heavily watched segment Saturday will feature top running back and wide receiver prospects dueling in the 40-yard dash.

That event took off in 2008 after Chris Johnson, then a largely unknown running back from East Carolina, motored down his lane in 4.24 seconds. That record time helped Johnson zoom up the draft board - Tennessee picked him 24th in the first round - and it's at the center of a social media explosion each year as fans speculate whether anyone will cover the ground faster.

"We track who and what is being talked about on social media, and everyone is obsessed with the 40," said NFL Network spokesman Alex Reithmiller. "Last year, buzz started building around Kent State wide receiver Dri Archer. We had him at 4.16 (seconds), which would have beat Johnson.

"Social media went crazy for a moment," Riethmiller added, "but unfortunately, when the official time came back, he was at 4.26."

That's why the NFL Network is adding to its technological toolbox, trying to better match up the numbers in real time. But whether all that improved data accurately projects a player's ability to make it at the next level remains an open question.

"I'm not a big track meet guy. And it's a track meet until they start hitting each other," Cardinals coach Bruce Arians said. "That's when you see football. Too many guys sky rocket because they ran a 4.3, then you turn the tape on, they don't hit anybody. So you can't get too enamored by the numbers."

Likewise, savvy fantasy players understand there's plenty of work left after the combine.

"For instance, I really like Amari Cooper, the wide receiver from Alabama," said Satterlof, who got his invitation by winning a league sponsored jointly by the hometown Colts and the NFL. "But I'm not sure how much seeing him today will give me an edge. And if he gets drafted by a a team with a bad quarterback, well ..."

Then what?

"Well," Satterlof said a moment later. "I guess it's not hard to see how this turns into a full-time obligation."

]]>Mon, 16 Feb 2015 17:08:01 GMTThe Best Industries for Starting a Business in 2015http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=216627
http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=216627These eight sectors are hotbeds of opportunity for entrepreneurs with the foresight and motivation to take advantage.

The old adage that timing is everything in business is incomplete. When it comes to launching a successful startup, the other crucial ingredient is identifying a new, untapped market opportunity. Breaking into any industry is hard, but certain sectors are particularly ripe for new entrants.

Inc.’s annual look at the best industries for starting a business is based on interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and industry experts, plus reams of the latest research on hot niche sectors. While it’s still early days for most of these fields, the first-movers are already well on their way to proving long-term viability. Read on to see where entrepreneurs are laying the groundwork for the fast-growing companies of the future.

Fantasy Sports Services

Gamification Services

Relaxation Beverages

Yoga and Pilates

Legal Marijuana

Food E-commerce

Public-Sector Technology

Agricultural Software

Fantasy Sports Services

The fantasy sports services industry, made up of companies that develop software and online platforms for multiplayer fantasy sports, is growing rapidly thanks to skyrocketing interest in fantasy sports and the growing number of broadband and mobile connections. Estimated to be a $1.4 billion market, the sector also benefits from growing advertising spending and an overall increase in sports viewership.

Why it's hot: Fantasy sports site FanDuel was valued at more than $1 billion during its last investment round, in September 2014, when it raised $70 million from NBC Sports Ventures and two private equity firms, KKR and Shamrock Capital Advisors.

Skills needed: Startups in this space will need strong Web software development and other IT skills.

Relaxation Beverages

Relaxation beverages--the opposite of energy drinks--are a $150 million industry in the U.S. With more than 70 million Americans reporting that they have trouble sleeping, the market opportunity for sleep-aid drinks is large. A separate opportunity exists for beverages designed to help increase focus. Although beverage shelves included some 450 different types of relaxation drinks in 2014, the market is not yet saturated, according to IBISWorld. Increasing demand from convenience stores and other retailers is expected to propel continued growth.

Why it's hot: Industry experts have chalked up growth in this industry to the novelty of the product. Interest in relaxation beverages may also be linked to a backlash against the growth of energy drinks like Red Bull, Monster, and others.

Skills needed: The ability to build brand awareness through traditional channels and social media is key in this segment.

Barriers to entry: Barriers to entry are low in this industry, but startup costs for a manufacturing operation are high.

The downside: The product development phase can take years, and there is the threat of stricter regulation from the Food and Drug Administration, which classifies relaxation beverages as a dietary supplement. Regulators may also come up with stricter guidelines for product labels, which could have an impact on marketability for some companies.

Competition: While just 37 companies offered relaxation beverages in 2009, there are now more than 80 fighting for market share, and the number of new entrants is expected to continue to grow.

Bubbling up: Relaxation beverage revenue grew 23 percent in 2014, to $153 million, and has risen at an annualized rate of 30 percent since 2009. Industry revenue is expected to increase at an annualized rate of 12 percent, to $263 million, in the next five years, according to IBISWorld.

Legal Marijuana

Legal marijuana has become big business in the U.S. since Colorado licensed vendors to sell recreational cannabis at the beginning of 2014. While the industry hasn't been around long, the first companies growing and distributing marijuana and related products are seeing very strong demand. Revenue for medical marijuana growers has risen 16 percent per year since 2009, reaching roughly $2 billion in 2014, according to IBISWorld.

Heating up: Demand for marijuana in all forms--edibles, concentrates, extracts--is booming and expected to only grow as more states legalize weed. In just the first three months of 2014, Colorado raised $25 million from businesses for taxes, licenses, and fees.

Barriers to entry: All marijuana businesses, whether growing in-house, selling other companies’ products, or manufacturing edibles, must comply with strict legal and regulatory hurdles, such as having a system that traces all products back to their original plants. Recreational marijuana businesses must also obtain a license.

Major bummer: Recreational marijuana is legal in only four U.S. states (Colorado, Washington, Alaska, and Oregon) and most banks still won’t take money from "cannabusinesses," though credit unions are in the process of receiving federal approval to accept cash deposits and provide other banking services. U.S. tax law also bars any business involved with marijuana, which is categorized as a Schedule I drug under federal law, from taking deductions for the costs of doing business. This can take the effective tax rate for marijuana businesses to more than 60 percent.

Competition: More than 500 companies launched in Colorado alone last year, including growers, dispensaries, and tech firms providingenterprise software for marijuana retailers.

Heady growth: Colorado’s retail marijuana market generated $350 million in revenue in 2014 and is projected to grow 20 percent, to $420 million, this year. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper also predicts that combined sales from recreational and medical cannabis will reach $1 billion by 2015.

Industry buzzword: "Seed-to-Sale" refers to the tracking systems that all businesses must use to trace their marijuana products all the way back to their seeds.

Public-Sector Technology

Believe it or not, many public-sector agencies at the federal, state, and local levels still use technology from the 1980s. As a result, hardware and software are sorely needed to build the infrastructure for 21st-century government. Innovations including cloud computing and mobile technology are making it possible to significantly increase efficiencies within the public sector, creating more cost-effective ways to do business in the $450 billion government IT market.

Outlook: Governmental budget constraints, adoption of the cloud, and open data are converging to create an opportunity for startups that provide hardware and software to the public sector.

Why it's hot: The $9 billion software company Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, has helped attract attention to this burgeoning sector. The recent launch of Govtech Fund, the first-ever venture fund dedicated to government technology startups, has also helped raised this industry’s profile.

Skills needed: Startups in this space will need strong cloud, web software development, and other IT skills, in addition to knowledge of compliance and regulatory issues.

Barriers to entry: Startup costs for hardware companies are high, and winning contracts in the compliance-driven government market can be a lengthy process.

Competition: The number of startups in this space is growing. Notable entrants during the past three years include Amigo Cloud, Department of Better Technology, and Seamless Docs.

Gamification Services

Gamification--the application of game dynamics to business settings--has been around for decades, but it's only relatively recently that digital technology has merged with the concept to create gamified software. Perhaps the most common example of gamification is the sales contest, where companies use game mechanics to stoke competition between workers. But startups are also offering other forms productivity software to help make work environments more enjoyable. Look no further than corporate titans Comcast, PayPal, and Stanley Black & Decker for evidence that big businesses are taking this strategy seriously.

Outlook: The use of game elements in non-gaming fields to engage employees and customers is expected to grow rapidly in the near future, in areas such as e-commerce and human resources.

Skills needed: Software development skills and the ability to educate potential customers on the high-concept power of the software.

The downside: Gamification has yet to live up to the expectation of many industry experts who predicted the technology would take off more than it has.

Competition: Competition is understood to be very low, as in most cases, companies are competing against old-school approaches such as whiteboards, gongs, and spreadsheets, rather than against each other.

Growth: The gamification market is expected to grow from $420 million in 2013 to $5.5 billion in 2018, according to data from Dallas-based research firm MarketsandMarkets.

Yoga and Pilates

Yoga and Pilates studios have been around for decades, but the industry has grown a great deal recently thanks in part to the rising number of health-conscious Americans. During the next five years, the number of yoga and Pilates studios in the U.S. is expected to grow at an annualized rate of 3.7 percent, to a total of 30,415. Including the sale of related products, yoga is estimated to be a $10 billion-plus industry.

The outlook: According to data from a Yoga Journal study, 20 million Americans participated in yoga in 2012, up from roughly 15.8 million in 2008. Separate data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association shows that yoga participation grew 4.5 percent in 2013. Today, nearly 45 percent of Americans say they are interested in trying yoga.

The downside: Fitness taxes have led many yoga studios to add a tax to membership fees, which could dissuade customers with limited income. According to the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association, 25 states tax health club memberships, including yoga memberships, and more states are expected to add this tax during the next five years.

Competition: Competition is growing from both traditional yoga studios as well as websites offering on-demand yoga services. Health and fitness clubs are also adding yoga classes as a part of their monthly memberships.

Food E-commerce

The trillion-dollar U.S. food industry represents a gargantuan market, but only a very small percentage of food sales comes through e-commerce. That’s expected to change in the next five to 10 years. Why? People are increasingly comfortable buying things online, and the infrastructure exists to distribute food with an e-commerce model. Companies in this space are also developing new, innovative ways of selling and distributing food online, including the use of subscription services.

Big appetite: Foodie culture has exploded in the U.S. thanks to the rise of celebrity chefs and food-focused TV shows, blogs, and other media. Consumers' growing awareness that buying food online can be more convenient than shopping at grocery stores is also helping drive this sector, as is the desire for healthier specialty food, which can be easier to find online than in local stores.

The downside: Consumers have been slow to accept the e-commerce model for food compared with virtually every other retail market.

Skills du jour: Experience in both food services and logistics, as well as website construction.

Competition: The $500 million startup Blue Apron is a major player in the field, delivering more than a million meals per month, while Amazon Fresh and Instacart represent competition for new grocery-focused startups.

Growth: Food and beverage e-commerce revenue grew to $6.8 billion in 2014 from $4.3 billion in 2011, according to IBISWorld. The industry is expected to reach $9.4 billion by next year.

Agricultural Software

A fresh crop of startups is in the process of revolutionizing agriculture by creating software that makes its processes more efficient. Farmers today are up to their ears in digital data, and there is a huge opportunity to turn that information into useful software and financial products--a fact that precision agriculture systems and services companies and venture capitalists have begun to wake up to.

Why it's hot: The venture capital community recently began piling into agriculture after identifying the opportunity to bring significant innovation to agriculture. The industry also attracted significant attention last November when Monsantopurchased farm tech startup the Climate Corporation for $930 million.

Field expertise: Startups will need deep knowledge of the agricultural sector as well as strong web software development and data science skills.

Barriers to entry: The rapidly changing technology in agriculture represents a significant hurdle for companies looking to break into the sector.

Sprouting nicely: The precision agriculture systems and services industry grew revenues at an annualized rate of 5.3 percent over the five years to 2014, to $1.5 billion, and is expected to grow at an annualized rate of 7 percent, to $2 billion, during the five-year period ending 2019, according to IBISWorld.

From all of your friends here at the Fantasy Sports Trade Association we would like to wish you a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year!

As you know, 2014 was a busy year for us here at FSTA and 2015 offers a lot to look forward to as well.

We hope that you will be joining us for our Winter Conference in Las Vegas on January 15 - 17 to kick the year off right, see where we're heading, and network with the movers and shakers of the industry!

The Patriots’ quarterback liked the idea of a fantasy app for the average Joe Sports Fan, rather than hardcore spreadsheet-crunchers. That and a UMich connection, anyways.

“Telemarketing’s a cool job,” says Tom Brady.

No, the New England Patriots quarterback and three-time Super Bowl champion isn’t changing careers. The line comes from a funny new commercial that hit the Web on Wednesday and quickly went viral, making the rounds on sports blogs and major news sites alike.

The ad is for DailyMVP, a little-known fantasy sports app that launched one year ago, and was not active for a full football season until this year. In the 30-second video, Brady, sitting at a cubicle with headset on, raves that DailyMVP is, “the super-awesome way to play fantasy sports every day. Just build your team, challenge your buddies, and boom shakalaka.”

In the business of fantasy sports, the incumbent giants are Yahoo, ESPN, and CBS, among others. They offer season-long fantasy sports drafts, for free or for money. But separate from those are two dueling rivals that offer daily fantasy (as an alternative to the season-long model): DraftKings and FanDuel. Both have a few hundred thousand users, have signed partnerships with some of the major sports leagues, and have been advertising aggressively—you might have noticed television ads for each if you watched college football games over the Thanksgiving holiday.

So how did DailyMVP, a relative unknown in comparison to the big two in the daily fantasy space, manage to woo Tom Brady as an endorser? The quarterback is notoriously choosy about sponsorships; while peers like Peyton Manning and Drew Brees are all over the television, hawking products like DirecTV, Buick and Gatorade (Manning) and Wrangler, Dove, and Vicks VapoRub (Brees), Brady is mostly invisible in marketing campaigns. In the past, he has endorsed Under Armour, UGG for Men, and UNREAL candy—and that’s about it.

Indeed, David Geller, CEO of TopLine Game Labs, which created the DailyMVP game, says it was no easy sell. “He does not make decisions lightly,” Geller tells Fortune. “We were in discussions with him for a very long time before he finally agreed to represent the DailyMVP brand.” DailyMVP first reached out to Brady over the summer, recruiting him as part of the conceit of having athletes that have been actual MVPs in its ads. (The other is basketball star Steve Nash; in his ad, he wears a wig and plays a librarian—it is equally funny, but Brady is a much bigger score. The ad with Nash, which came out in October, has 63,000 views. The Brady video, two days old, has 400,000.)

When approached, Brady had specific requirements and hesitations. “With Tom, he had to be comfortable with the product but also with the quality of the team—he wanted to make sure that we weren’t just three guys in a garage trying to rope him in,” says Geller, who certainly has the fantasy cred: he headed up Yahoo’s fantasy sports division before leaving to create TopLine, and some of his engineers also come from Yahoo.

It was also important to Brady, says Geller, that, “the games were accessible to everybody, and casual in nature, not games for hardcore gambling-type guys.”

That is the premise DailyMVP is banking on: that while DraftKings and FanDuel are more suited to the super-serious fantasy sports whiz who sets up spreadsheets, examines data, and does homework, the casual fan who just wants to jump in for fun needs a product, too. DailyMVP seeks to be fast to set up (“we want someone standing in line at Starbucks to be able to draft before they reach the front of the line,” says Geller), stress-free, and fun, if not necessarily lucrative.

This is the next frontier in the fantasy sports market: mobile-first products that seek to attract the less hardcore, more lax sports enthusiast to fantasy. But Geller says TopLine has plans beyond sports: its technology can be used to create a quick, one-day fantasy games around anything from reality television to awards shows. And it plans to roll out such games as soon as they find appropriate brands to partner up with on them, as the company did with Sports Illustrated (which is owned by Time Inc., as is Fortune) to power its Fan Nation fantasy app. While DailyMVP is the first brand from TopLine (and currently offers football, baseball, basketball and hockey), “we could put out a fantasy-style game tomorrow for watching Keeping Up with The Kardashians,” Geller says. “The categories we’ve identified are sports, entertainment, and finance, and there are a lot of games that could be built on our platform that require very little incremental development. We could very easily have a game for the WWE, or for an awards show.”

For now, the Nash and Brady videos haven’t even aired on television, and may not. They are online-only, and apart from the two videos, Geller says, “we frankly haven’t done anything in terms of marketing.” Perhaps the videos were enough, for now, to gin up interest in the app. (Recall how a single funny, viral video put Dollar Shave Club on the map.) And while TopLine would not disclose details of the endorsement deals, there is a strong likelihood that both Nash and Brady got small equity stakes in the company, as is increasingly the case in deals between athletes and startups these days.

Geller says there will be more marketing done with Brady in 2015, after the football season is over. And as for landing that rare endorser, he added, “it helped that we’re both University of Michigan guys.”

]]>Fri, 5 Dec 2014 23:22:18 GMTTom Brady is a Telemarketer in New Ad for Daily Fantasy Site DailyMVPhttp://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=205518
http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=205518

Fast-growing fantasy sports startup FanDuel has revealed that it will soon be launching a Premier League offering of its popular one-day leagues.

The four-year-old firm, which was founded in Edinburgh and moved in above Skyscanner’s office earlier this month, currently only runs competitions for US sports leagues, such as the NFL, NBA and NHL. Customers log on to the AWS-hosted FanDuel mobile app or website and pay to enter the one-day leagues with the hope of winning a cash prize.

“We will launch a product in the UK, we just haven’t done it yet,” said FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles last week. “I think we’re going to see how the next three to six months go. It will be a Fantasy Football product. This will be our next market.”FanDuel expects Premier League fantasy football enthusiasts to use its platform “on top of” the season-long competitions offered by the likes of Barclays, The Telegraph and Play Togga.

The company, which isn’t particularly well-known in the country it was founded, has attracted $88 million (£56 million) in funding to date and the founders are optimistic they can go on to produce the UK’s next billion dollar firm.

However, in order to do this, Eccles said the company must now go on an aggressive hiring spree and double its workforce from 125 to 250 within the next year.

Fantasy Football Isn’t Just a Man’s Game

By COURTNEY RUBINNOV. 26, 2014New York Times: Fashion & Style

From left, Adrienne Allen, Becca Garrison and Laura Tipton watch N.F.L. action and check their fantasy football progress at the Promenade Bar and Grill in Manhattan.CreditDanny Kim for The New York Times

When Odell Beckham Jr. of the New York Giants caught a 43-yard touchdown pass last Sunday by snagging the ball from behind his head with one hand, among the beneficiaries of his impressive skill was Kim Meyer, head of public relations for Christian Dior Beauty.

Ms. Meyer, 33, is a fledgling but rabid player of fantasy football, whereby participants select a roster of National Football League players that they often draft under the limit of a salary cap, earning points based on the individual players’ performances. Those who triumph in a fantasy league win money or bragging rights — particularly sweet when the losers are guys who have been playing fantasy football since they were kids. “It’s so fun to beat them,” Ms. Meyer said.

For last weekend’s round of games, Ms. Meyer picked Mr. Beckham, a wide receiver. She did so on a lark. “I like to have a Giants player on my roster — bonus that he went to school in Louisiana like me — and ended up with the ‘Greatest Catch of All Time’ in my lineup!” she said by email.

From left, Courtney Kirby, Brandon Marianne Lee and Ashley Williams, sisters who host the “Her Fantasy Football” podcast.CreditDanny Kim for The New York Times

The fast-growing fan sport of fantasy football has largely been portrayed as a male pastime, but a surge of women are grabbing the ball as well. The number of women playing fantasy football in the United States and Canada has more than doubled since 2007, to 8.3 million this year, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Women now compose 20 percent of all players, an attractive and growing business: In a four-year period, their spending on related magazines, memberships and other content has more than doubled, to $334 million in 2012.

Female fantasy game play has been oxygenated by a breed of websites such as FanDuel and DraftKings that allow players to drop in for a weekend instead of having to commit to an entire season. Women are joining FanDuel — which recently raised $70 million from investors — twice as fast as men, according to the company’s chief executive, Nigel Eccles.

Since Ms. Meyer started playing at the beginning of this season, she has sat out just one round of games, amid Paris Fashion Week. “I’m surprised at how into it I am,” she said of the competition.

Unflattering stereotypes abound about the female fantasy football player — does it only because of her boyfriend/husband, picks based on how cute the players are — but these days, young women are turning to fantasy football as a way to bond with friends, especially faraway ones with whom they communicate about their hobby on social media and GChat. Some admit to enjoying the extra-point talking points at the bar, but they say meeting men is just a fringe benefit.

In fact, many women scorn making recruitment decisions based on aesthetics and frown upon consulting boyfriends or husbands. Liz Loza, an actress who has appeared on ABC’s “Scandal,” for several years avoided mentioning that she was married on “X’s & Y’s Podcast,” her fantasy football program. “There are men who would think that a guy would be feeding it to me,” she said of the commentary and analysis she provides. Ms. Loza, also known as the Fantasy Football Girl, wrote her 2010 wedding vows to include a promise to beat her husband at fantasy football and has routinely lived up to her wifely obligation.

“It’s kind of like a sorority,” said Adrienne Allen, 29, referring to Fantasy Femmes, the all-woman fantasy football league she founded five years ago with her college friend Candace Armstrong (University of North Carolina, “Go Heels!”). They take to GChat, discussing friends who want to join their league and whether they can be counted on to take the league seriously.

“We talk about people and we say, ‘Do you think she’s going to play hard all year?' ” Ms. Allen said. “And we kick people out if they don’t.”

She is so competitive that she refuses to name her favorite research sources, lest she tip off the competition. But she will reveal that her diligence includes scanning the Internet for articles about players’ personal lives because drama can affect performance. “It’s a huge soap opera,” she said of the N.F.L.

Alyssa Vitrano plays hardball, too. She is the commissioner of the GrapeBallers, a coed league with take-no-prisoners rules. For instance, team owners must respond to at least one group email every three weeks. Failure to do so because you are giving birth earns no immunity.

Ms. Vitrano has a thought-through game plan when it comes to drafting players for her roster. Her team almost always includes a New York Giants player. Also, she favors players who will be competing against the Oakland Raiders or the Jacksonville Jaguars, the two teams with the worst records this season.

When she struggles to complete her lineup, she may consult Start ’Em, Sit’Em, a blog on NFL­.com. In other Hail Mary moments, she resorts to Thumb, an app on which users ask yes-or-no questions and other Thumbers weigh in.

Companies trying to attract the female fantasy football demographic are learning that these players are serious about the fan sport and will not tolerate “girl talk.”

Laura Tipton, Becca Garrison, Lyzz Ogunwo and Adrienne Allen among the men at the Promenade Bar and Grill.CreditDanny Kim for The New York Times

This fall, espnW, ESPN’s dedicated website for women, integrated regular fantasy football coverage into its offerings by bringing on fantasy football columnists, three sisters who host a podcast and blog called “Her Fantasy Football.” The sisters are Courtney Kirby, Brandon Marianne Lee and Ashley Williams, who grew up tossing a hot-pink-and-green Nerf football around the living room in the shadow of their dad’s Orange Bowl ring. (He played for the University of Colorado.) On the podcast, they occasionally talk about their fantasy “boyfriends” and their desire to make out with the Chicago Bears running back Matt Forte.

The sisters’ first post for espnW went light on performance statistics, focusing instead on a relationship-based rating system in which the best players were called “Marriage Material,” the very good gridironers were “Boyfriend Potential,” and the occasional standouts were called “Friends With Benefits” and “One-Night Stands.”

Reaction was swift and brutal, and the conceit was quickly dropped. (The intended sarcastic tone, Ms. Williams said, did not translate.)

Despite being turned off by the pinkification of football products and websites geared to women, female fans of fantasy leagues do not seem deterred by the N.F.L.'s recent domestic abuse scandal.

Ms. Allen, for example, said she has drastically cut back her spending on gear — but it has not appeared to dim women’s enthusiasm for their fantasy games.

Ms. Vitrano, who also started a family league for her nephews, ages 9 and 12, said that she had become uncomfortable in recent months with what she might be exposing them to by starting certain players. But she is not letting allegations affect her lineups.

“You’ve got to just go with the players who are best in fantasy,” she said.

Fantasy football is not about supporting the N.F.L. as much as it is about engaging with friends and relatives over a shared love of sport, many female fans say.

Abby Gardner, a beauty writer, editor and Indianapolis Colts die-hard, began playing fantasy football after she saw her younger sister enjoy the camaraderie of the fantasy game — as well as a draft-day-turned-girls-weekends in Palm Springs. (She also realized that a win in fantasy can help “lessen the blow when my real-life team gets embarrassed and decimated,” she said.)

Sunday has now become a day of close contact (even if it is over email) for Ms. Gardner’s geographically dispersed and time-crunched circle of loved ones. “This way I talk to everyone,” she said.

Ms. Meyer, the Christian Dior publicist, has similarly found a way to make fantasy football a social activity, drawing her cohort into her league. She now competes against teams led by other fashion-industry professions including her best friend, Elif Gezgec, who works for the brand Brunello Cucinelli, and Ms. Meyer’s younger sister, Kate, an account executive at jewelry and handbag company Monica Rich Kosann.

This allows her to spend most of her Sundays watching games in bars with friends. Last weekend, she, Ms. Gezgec and other friends hit Daddy-O in the West Village in time for the Broncos game at 4:25 p.m. They stayed until close to midnight, when the Giants game ended.

Despite Mr. Beckham’s contender for best catch in N.F.L. history, the Giants lost to the Dallas Cowboys, 31-28.

When he woke up on the morning of Oct. 5 — a beautiful fall day when many New Yorkers started raking leaves — Mark Guindi never imagined he would rake in something else: a cool $12,000.

“It was the craziest thing,” says the handsome 24-year-old Brooklynite, who scored big in a fantasy football tourney called FanDuel NFL Sunday Million. “I wake up one day, put up a $25 entry fee, and I make 12,000 bucks.”

Guindi is now making a name for himself in the upper leagues of daily fantasy football, drafting a team of real-world athletes to pit against other players. In three weeks, he’ll be trading his winter jacket for suntan lotion as he hits Vegas for the ultracompetitive Fantasy Football Championship sponsored by daily fantasy sports league site FanDuel. There, he’ll be vying for a $2 million jackpot, against the country’s top 100 players.

He gets $15,000 just for showing up.

Mark Guindi at homePhoto: Anne Wermiel

“$15,000 is nice,” says Guindi, the oldest of five boys from a Syrian Orthodox family. But “$2 million is nicer.”

Not bad for a college dropout who works in his family’s wholesale supply company during the week. On the weekend, he dominates the fantasy football field, now his main source of income.

“I can definitely do this full time,” he says of his yearlong daily fantasy sports (DFS) career, from which he’s banked more than $50,000 so far. (Unlike traditional fantasy sports, where you’re stuck with a team for an entire season, DFS players can reap rewards in a single day.)

“I’m only getting better and better every week.”

The hunk admits he has certain traits that separate him from the pack.

“I’m young and not the worst-looking guy in the world,” says Guindi, who’s earned a fan base all his own from writing for the site Fantasy Insiders and making appearances on sports shows.

But Guindi is just one rising star in a constellation of fantasy players in the US and Canada — about 41 million, up 5 million in the last year alone. While only a small percentage is composed of money-hungry DFS players, their numbers are also on the rise.

FanDuel expects to pay out more than $500 million in prizes this year and more than $1 billion in 2015. Its active users will likely hit 1 million this year — more than quadruple the previous year.

“Money drives daily fantasy play,” says Paul Charchian, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. “People want to win money — but they can also play for fun.”

Also a boon: the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which protects fantasy sports, but outlaws activities including online poker.

“The line is a lot murkier now,” he adds, referring to DFS, “but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle — it’s not going away.”

The “skill” of the game works like this: DFS sites offer hundreds of contests that players can buy into. Using their statistical knowledge, players assemble a lineup of real footballers who are competing in actual matchups all over the country. The site awards athletes points based on their performance — and DFS entrants win cash depending on how well their lineup fares overall.

After crushing contest after contest, former mathematician Michael Leone left the stability of a full-time job as an energy analyst in upstate New York for the wild-card culture of DFS. He quit his job after bringing home a $75,000 check from a fantasy sports tournament held at LA’s Playboy Mansion in August 2013.

Michael Leone (above right), with pal Drew Dinkmeyer, quit his job as an energy analyst to play fantasy sports full time.Photo: Courtesy of Mike Leone

“This is my first year doing it full time, and I will surpass my income [as an energy analyst],” says Leone, who, at 27, admits his new job is extremely volatile. Still, in the past two years, he estimates he’s made in the low six figures, the lion’s share of which comes from football.

“Yes, there’s luck involved, but it’s skill in the long run. If someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing puts all their money into one thing on one night, that’s gambling. But [my partners and I] do all the proper research, put in proper money — that is skill-based.”

And as long as the spreadsheets don’t bring problems into the bedsheets, his math-teacher wife is onboard. “I had to convince my wife to let me set lineups,” Leone sheepishly admits, “on our honeymoon in the Finger Lakes.”

Even college students are looking to get in on the action. Inside the “war room” — a sports shrine with TV screens and laptops blasting every football game live — in his family’s New Jersey basement, Chayden Sovocool is wheeling and dealing like a seasoned pro, consulting clients on their lineups and taking a 5 percent commission from friends.

College student Chayden Sovocool in his fantasy “war room”Photo: imAlexM.com

The 19-year-old, who only discovered DFS during March Madness this year, admits he couldn’t resist the intoxicating world.

“You’re telling me I could do fantasy football and make actual money out of this? Sign me up!” the William Paterson University sophomore remembers thinking.

“I lost right away — it’s a lot harder than you think,” he recalls of his sluggish early start.

But having banked a couple thousand dollars since then has galvanized the newbie — who hopes to make enough from fantasy play to move out on his own.

High-stakes fantasy player Tommy Gelati compares DFS to stock trading. After all, he does both.

“There’s 100 percent truth that fantasy is the new day trading,” says Tommy G, as he’s known in the fantasy community. “Instead of day-trading companies, you’re day-trading athletes.”

The 35-year-old stock trader, who lives at the foot of the Giants’ MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, says he earns up to $400,000 annually in his day job. But every Saturday, he hunkers down for hours conducting fantasy research. (He is also an expert with paid subscribers on scoutfantasy. com.)

Tom Gelati poses in front of his Jaguar outside his East Rutherford residence.Photo: Anthony Causi

“I haven’t gone out on a Saturday night in a long time,” says Gelati, who estimates that he’s raked in $500,000 over the past two years from DFS, earning him the moniker “The Wolf of DFS.”

“That’s my brand,” he explains.

And the Wolf never misses an opportunity — even when he’s stuck in Jersey traffic. A few months ago, realizing the clock was ticking with a few minutes left to enter a DFS contest, Gelati pulled his $90,000 Jaguar XFR over at a gas station on Route 17, where he made an eleventh-hour lineup just under the wire.

He made $18,000 that day.

But for the Jersey boy who always dreamed of going pro, making money off the pros feels just as sweet. “It feels good to go into a store and ask for the most expensive model, spending my fantasy money,” he admits. “I created it out of thin air.”

So what exactly is it? It's a game in which football fans take the term "armchair quarterback" to a whole new level. About a dozen people get together to form a league. There are various styles of play, and the leagues can have different rules.But, in general, each member becomes an owner and drafts real NFL players for his or her virtual team. The owners pick their starting lineup each week to match up against one another throughout the season. Points are earned based on action from the professional games, such as yards gained, touchdowns and field goals.

Early versions of the hobby started in the '50s, but fantasy sports — especially fantasy football — became popular in the '80s and '90s. The Internet created the optimal platform for the game, and now there are dozens of websites that host leagues for free (not to mention the hundreds boasting of draft strategies, player statistics and game pointers).

You don't have to know everything about football to play the fantasy sport, but whether you see yourself as a future team owner or not, at least after watching this video you can say, "Now I Get It."

"Eighty percent of fantasy players tell us they expect to be playing in a decade, and half say they will play until they die," he added.

Scott Minto, professor of sports business at San Diego State University and a fantasy football player, likened it to March Madness—where participants pick who they think will win the NCAA college basketball title.

"Those that wouldn't normally care about who wins the NCAA title have an interest when they take part in the bracket pools," he said.

"It's the same way with fantasy football," Minto explained.

Nearly 37 million play fantasy football

An estimated 41 million people will play some sort of fantasy sports in the U.S. and Canada this year, up from 32 million in 2012, according to the FSTA.

Participation in all fantasy sports has grown by more than 60 percent the last four years with 19 percent of all males in the U.S. playing fantasy sports.

And it's big dollars. According to the FSTA, around $1.6 billion is spent across all fantasy sports on items like apps and access to pro sports packages for fantasy player tracking.

There's also fantasy sports-related magazines and online premium content for fans to buy.

Another $1.7 billion is spent on entry fees to fantasy leagues at an average of $70 to $100 per person. While not all leagues require fees, some can go as high as $5,000 or more.

As big as the industry is, the largest fantasy draw is football. Nearly 37 million people will play fantasy football this year, or 90 percent of all fantasy players.

Basics of fantasy football

The way fantasy football works—laid out here in basic terms—participants can join a league or form one of their own. There are public leagues, with no fees, or private ones, that do require a fee to play.

There can be as many teams as a league determines but the average is around eight to 10.

There are draft days where participants pick pro players. They can begin as early as May or June before the pro season begins, or as late as a week before the first pro game.

The goal is to pick 15 to 18 individual pro players from across NFL teams for the offense, while whole defensive squads of a pro team are chosen.

During the year, and even with each game, players on the fantasy offensive squads can be switched out with reserves.

Much like the pro game itself, there are ways to get other players during the season such as a free agency pool, waiver wires and trades.

Then it's all about watching each game and hoping your player or players have the better statistics than the other teams.

For example, if you have Denver's Peyton Manning as your starting quarterback, you want him to have the most touchdowns, passing yards and least interceptions than any other quarterback that week.

And if you have the Pittsburgh Steelers as your defensive squad, you want them to allow the least points and get the most tackles and quarterback sacks.

Just like the real thing, fantasy teams that do well enter a playoff system to crown an eventual champion. If you're in a pay-for-play league, who might win a pot of money.

Some leagues allow playing on a weekly basis with high payouts in cash.

Top players for fantasy sites

The top sties for hosting leagues include Fox Sports, My Fantasy League and FanDuel.

But FSTA's Charchian said the industry mostly comes down to a big four of ESPN, Yahoo,CBS and the NFL.

"They're vying desperately for fantasy players," he said. "There's a lot of advertising revenue for sites that have the eyeballs of players."

Ken Fuchs, vice president and group leader at Yahoo Sports, said there's a reason brands like Toyota and Snickers advertise on Yahoo's fantasy sport sites.

"As a product (fantasy sports) has a user engagement, volume of user activity and scale that are virtually impossible to match," Fuchs wrote in an email to CNBC.

Fuchs said that Yahoo fantasy players spend more than 29 billion minutes playing fantasy sports every year, with the average being 500 minutes each month.

He added that while Yahoo does not have a direct relationship with the NFL, the two have been working on Web and mobile device initiatives to distribute NFL content.

Calls to the NFL to discuss its fantasy football platform were not returned.

Loss of productivity at work

While not considered gambling, some employers are worried about workers spending too much time on their fantasy leagues. And there may be some cause for concern.

]]>Wed, 10 Sep 2014 18:15:22 GMTAs football season kicks off, states target fantasy play!http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=191590
http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=191590With millions of participants and millions of dollars on the online (both legitimate and illegitimate), fantasy sports has become big business. But as the hobby, or sport, matures, the games players can participate in is evolving at a rapid pace.

This rapid evolution and expansion, with the stakes getting higher to boot, now has regulators taking a peak at the business. Most recently, lawmakers in Kansas have started making some threats.

Paul Charchian, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, has been around the industry for many years and he believe's what's happening in Kansas shouldn’t be ignored. While states like Maryland have actively made fantasy sports legal, Kansas has gone the other way.

“The Kansas Racing Commission has decided that fantasy sports with an entry fee, even among friends where there’s no ‘rake’ and all the money’s coming in and going back out is in their mind a game of chance.” With Kansas now seeing it as a form of gambling, Charchian says “they’ve effectively criminalized fantasy play for hundreds of thousands of Kansas residents.”

Charchian and other folks in the industry obviously object to the characterization, claiming it takes much skill and experience to be effective in fantasy year over year, thus meaning it’s not a game a chance. Forty-seven other states agree with them.

Legal issues aside, the fantasy industry is booming with all kinds of new games and services. The rise of daily games has become a huge boon to the industry and fantasy players, with shorter-term games more accessible and payoff more immediate for competitors.

On the flipside, current leagues are now calculating all kinds of new categories (Charchian notes old fantasy football leagues just counted touchdowns), like receptions, bonuses for longer touchdown plays, and ratios like WHIP and OPP for baseball. With added complications come more sophisticated, long-term setups like “empire” leagues.

According to Charchian, empire leagues “roll over half of the year’s funds from year to year, waiting for someone to win two years in a row and then that person gets the rolling pot in an empire league,” he says. “So these leagues are for people thinking four, five, six years down the road as they are playing long term because they know they’re going to keep playing fantasy for that long.”

On the services side, new offerings giving fantasy players starting line-up advice, to league management, and even escrow services (with Charchian himself operating one calledLeagueSafe.com), are appearing almost every day now.

]]>Fri, 5 Sep 2014 16:07:03 GMTThe hidden business benefits of fantasy footballhttp://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=187020
http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=187020Football! The real kind, with shoulder pads and helmets and touchdowns. Americans love it. We watch and we cheer and cry over our favorite team's ups and downs. And we fantasize over it -- big time.

In the countless fantasy football leagues that have sprung in recent years, players act as team managers who get to pick their own teams out of the ranks of real football players. The statistics from each player's real weekly statistics are used to determine who won each each week.

It's all harmless fun, except in one respect: time. Career services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas calculates that fantasy football costs $13 billion per year in lost productivity. Perhaps understandably, the sight of employees industriously building spreadsheets to manage their teams causes some managers to freak out. Oh my word! My entire business is going to fall apart because everyone in marketing is playing in a fantasy football league!

Fantasy Football of Shopping | Secrets of Successful Startups

My advice? Chill. U.S. Gross Domestic Product for 2014 is estimated to hit $16.8 trillion. A $13 billion loss amounts to 0.0077 percent. Of course, a handful of workers may spend an inordinate amount of time in fantasy football land, but overall the lost productivity for employers is almost certain to be minimal.

In fact, there's no need to get alarmed over any minor time-waster at work -- so long as it doesn't harm anything and affect a company's business. Managers really only need to address the issue if an activity appears to lower productivity and deadline and goals aren't being met.

Meanwhile, we do tons of things to encourage "team building" in the workplace. In fact, many companies hire consultants or have HR teams devoted entirely to making sure departments work well together in teams. Instead of paying a consultant to come in, recognize that sometimes an activity like fantasy football can do the team building for you. And at an estimated 0.0077 percent of your budget? A bargain, to be sure.

Of course, since not everyone is quite so pigskin-crazed, a fantasy league shouldn't be your only team -building event of the year. But it may well be your cheapest and most effective at bring people together.

So when you spot an employee at his desk on Monday updating his team's roster, take a breath and update yours. Game on.

Thanks largely to a major cultural shift from desktop to mobile media, fantasy football diehards are already obsessively checking their smartphones as NFL training camps push forward. And publishers are ready for the rush with revamped mobile apps.

ESPN has reconfigured its fantasy football game experience for an on-the-go consumer after it saw 68 percent of its overall digital traffic last year come from mobile. Its fantasy football players’ mobile activity doubled over the last two seasons.

Not only will players be able to set up leagues and mock draft talent through mobile, but also enhanced features to be unveiled in August will let users’ social circles comment and “outright ridicule” their decision-making process via the app, said George Leimer, ESPN vp of fantasy games. “You can literally play fantasy football this year without touching your desktop.”

CBSSports.com has also retooled its mobile platform, enabling live drafting—with plans to introduce an app called Fantasy Draft Kit during the first week of August. In 2013, three out of four of its players used CBSSports.com’s mobile app, up 33 percent from 2012. Users jumped 45 percent year over year, which means the app is drawing new users.

But, while the users shift to mobile, brands are still slow to shift their investments, eMarketer mobile senior analyst Catherine Boyle said. “The eyeballs [move to the platform] first and then the money follows,” she explained.

UM svp Tim Hill notes that marketers drastically undervalue the mobile fantasy football space. Four out of five players are male and tend to be a younger crowd—one of the hardest demographics to reach, per the agency’s research. The average fantasy player checks four to six Web destinations for information, on top of the site or mobile app that hosts his or her team.

Because most brands are slow to adapt to mobile, forward-leaning companies will win if they embrace it now, added Hill. “There’s a bigger opportunity to have ownership of apps and platforms, and there’s less clutter within the ad formats than there is with desktop,” he said.

RotoWire chief Peter Schoenke, however, argued that brands are starting to come around. The success of RotoWire’s play—similarly named to CBS' as it's dubbed Fantasy Football Draft Kit— as the top selling fantasy football iOS app in 2013 helped secure DraftKings.com as a sponsor this year. “Brands value those customers who show they’ll pay for a product,” said Schoenke.

CBSSports.com expects to attract more advertisers than it did last year and has secured Jack Link’s Beef Jerky. “There’s been fantastic interest already,” said Jonathan Dube, CBSSports.com general manager.

Meanwhile, ESPN has at least 10 sponsors lined up for this season, including Wiser’s Whiskey and BMW, which will feature a big mobile component in its overall fall campaign, according to a source.

ESPN fantasy analyst Matthew Berry has an alternative theory on players’ migration to mobile: “In order to compete and play well, you need to do that in the three minutes when your wife isn’t looking.”

This article and others like it are part of our new subscription.Learn More »

BOSTON — As with many start-ups, the idea was born from trivia that suddenly did not seem so useless — the statistics of professional athletes.

Even in his youth, Jason Robins was in touch with his inner Billy Beane, drafting and trading baseball players in fantasy sports leagues. He was a marketing professional at Vistaprint when he and two colleagues, who also had teams in numerous fantasy leagues, discovered an underdeveloped niche: daily fantasy sports websites, which let players put their Moneyball skills — and cash — up against others’ while compressing the grind of a season into a single day.

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Robins, 33, and his colleagues, Matthew Kalish, 32, and Paul Liberman, 31, started their own site, DraftKings.com, in April 2012. They knew they could attract players, with each day offering an opportunity to build a new roster and to cash in. The surprise has been that professional leagues — traditionally ferocious opponents of gambling on their sports, online or off — have quietly embraced gambling on fantasy sports, apparently aware that the passion for it is crucial to their bottom lines.

Photo

Jason Robins, a founder of DraftKings, at the company's office in Boston. The website began in April 2012.CreditGretchen Ertl for The New York Times

Major League Baseball especially has taken daily fantasy sports under its wing. It has a partnership with DraftKings, which offers a daily contest onMLB.com in which prizes include tickets to games rather than cash.

That stance may be surprising for a league that barred Pete Rose for life for betting on games, but baseball executives see daily fantasy sports as an increasingly important part of their future.

In fact, Robert Bowman, the chief executive of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the league’s Internet company, said it was exploring a larger partnership with DraftKings and did not rule out the possibility of cash tournaments or other formats in which money is at stake.

“We have spent a lot of time inside here and talking to other outside experts and have concluded these are games of skill and adhere to the federal law,” Bowman said. “It keeps people interested in the games.

“Season-long fantasy is a war of attrition. The cleverness here is that it’s over quickly, and for a younger generation, it’s more appropriate. It’s where the people are. It drives traffic. It’s not to make extra bucks for MLB.com. It is evolving, and we are continuing to evolve.”

The N.F.L. declined to comment on its view of daily fantasy sports, but the league’s lobbyists, along with lobbyists from other professional leagues, successfully pushed to exempt fantasy sports from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which outlawed online poker and sports betting.

Nigel Eccles, a founder of another leading site, FanDuel, said the success that daily fantasy sports had achieved in a short period of time had gotten the professional leagues’ attention. Last year, FanDuel paid out $150 million; this year, that figure is expected to more than double, to $400 million.

Photo

Ian Hills, a software engineer, working at DraftKings.CreditGretchen Ertl for The New York Times

“Leagues are very supportive of fantasy in general, including daily sports,” said Eccles, whose company started in 2009. “We have had informal relationships with them, but we think that will change.”

In many respects, the general sports culture has caught up with the fans behind DraftKings and FanDuel. Fantasy sports place a premium on data, and technological and statistical advances have made a nearly infinite amount of information available instantly.

While season-long fantasy games have long been a major business, with giants like Yahoo, ESPN and CBS hosting leagues, daily fantasy sports websites offer instant gratification.

Like a general manager in a professional sport, players are given a salary cap they cannot exceed in filling out their lineups. There are contests for as little as a quarter or as much as $1,000, and total prize pools ranging from $54 to $100,000.

Daily fantasy sites have also benefited from a Justice Department crackdown on online poker. On April 15, 2011, a day now known to gamblers as Black Friday, the department seized the Internet addresses of three of the largest online poker websites and unsealed fraud and money laundering charges against the sites’ operators.

Gavin Lamothe, a 32-year-old insurance broker, was one of those left without a place to gamble. He began playing on fantasy sites, entering tournaments for $2 to $10, checking on players’ on-base and slugging percentages, and learning how to manage his payroll.

Although he started small, just as he had for online poker, Lamothe was soon spending 35 hours a week researching for and playing daily fantasy games. He won more than $50,000 last year, he said, and discovered another pastime.

“It’s become an extended poker room,” he said. “You get familiar with other players. You learn their strengths and how they like to build a lineup.

Photo

Adam Pelloso worked on a logo for DraftKings for a coming golf tournament contest.CreditGretchen Ertl for The New York TimesContinue reading the main story

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“But as the prizes have grown, so have the number of players, and that’s become harder. I’m starting to see a lot more recreational gamblers coming online.”

DraftKings and FanDuel, as well as larger sites like Yahoo, have tried to distance themselves from other kinds of online gambling, emphasizing that knowledge and skill are rewarded rather than pure luck. But the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, which has 170 members, recently hired lobbyists to track legislation that would make online gambling illegal across the country.

The companies want to protect the fantasy sports exemption of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, especially at this time of expansion, when major players like Yahoo and ESPN are deciding whether to enter the daily fantasy market. But daily fantasy websites still make up a relatively small market, and the companies’ more immediate focus is on making sure fantasy players know the games are available.

Even though DraftKings has had more than 500,000 players and has more than 2,500 compete in its $2 contest daily, those figures are but a fraction of the more than 36 million people who play in season-long fantasy leagues.

“That’s a pretty low market penetration — about 1 or 1.5 percent for an industry with enough liquidity to have these large prize pools and daily content that is evergreen,” Robins, one of the DraftKings founders, said.

DraftKings and FanDuel have promoted themselves with advertisements that have become ubiquitous on sports talk radio across the country, and both companies are offering grander contests and breaking into new sports as they vie for market share.

DraftKings has been more aggressive, recently buying the New York-based DraftStreet — the No. 3 company in the space — and increasing its customer base by 50 percent. In a little over two years, it has gone from a seven-person company run out of an apartment with a payout of $50 million to a more than 85-member outfit with offices in Boston and New York that are expected to handle more than $200 million this year.

Next month, 50 players will compete in the site’s $3.3 million Fantasy Baseball Championship, with $1 million earmarked for the winner. DraftKings has also introduced a game built around golf’s four major championships; $300,000 will be given away for the contest around the P.G.A. Championship in August, with $100,000 to the winner.

The N.F.L., the N.B.A. and Major League Baseball may continue to explore what to do with daily fantasy sports as they continue their fight against the legalization of sports betting.

“In their eyes, the leagues don’t want to see gambling legalized, but they know how much traffic and interest fantasy is driving,” said Michael Rathburn, who is tracking the industry for Rotowire.com. “This was the happy medium.”

]]>Tue, 29 Jul 2014 19:13:32 GMTFantasyAlarm.com Offering Live Chat TODAY at 2 PM PSThttp://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=178641
http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=178641Tired of getting answers in 140 characters on Twitter? Are you tired of calling in to radio show and being forced to wait on hold for 45 minutes for an answer to your query? Do you want to know which players are surging up offseason ADP charts in fantasy football? What about which baseball players should you be cutting bait on? What about that hotshot rookie who has been tearing it up - do you hold on or move on? Do you want to know why Jeff Mans and Ray Flowers did what they did in the FSTA Football Draft this week? Do you want to know which of the guys passed out drunk in a bar celebrating the draft? We've got an answer to all of your fantasy questions.

FantasyAlarm.comis offering a live chat today (June 20th), and every Friday, at 2 PM EDT (11 AM PST). Yours truly, Ray Flowers, will be joined by my BFF Jeff Mans and we will answer any an all fantasy questions you have.

Here's all you need to do to be a part of the event.

(1) You need to sign in to your Fantasy Alarm account. You can create an account for Free – don't worry we aren't asking for a donation or anything like that.

SAN FRANCISCO – Fantasy sports participation in the United States and Canada has reached the 41-million mark according to new research conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs for the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA). This finding shows the highest participation numbers in the industry’s history with nearly one-in-four males playing fantasy sports.

Complete results of the survey were unveiled today at the FSTA Summer Conference sponsored by Optimal Payments.

The 41 million number represents a nearly 13% increase in the number of U.S. and Canadian fantasy sports players compared to a similar Ipsos study conducted in 2012 and a 25% increase from its 2010 survey.

"The continuing increase in fantasy sports participation illustrates two core elements of fantasy play,” said FSTA president Paul Charchian. “First, fantasy sports remains a social activity, made more enjoyable when playing with friends. Second, people don't stop playing fantasy sports. Eighty percent of fantasy sports players believe they will still be playing in 10 years, and 40% believe they will play until they die. Combine those trends with our fastest growing demographic, players under 18, and there's reason to believe that fantasy sports will remain a foundational sports pastime."

Two other key findings from the 2014 study indicate that 31% of males age 12-29 played fantasy sports in the last 12 months and 30% of males age 12-45 played fantasy sports in the last 12 months.

About the FSTAThe Fantasy Sports Trade Association represents the fantasy sports industry with over 175 members ranging from small startups to large media corporations. As the voice of the industry since 1998, the FSTA has been the leader in providing demographic data, annual conferences and collective action to ensure unfettered growth. Visit http://www.fsta.org for more information.

MethodologyThese are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association from May 14-19, 2014. For the survey, representative randomly selected samples of 1,209 U.S. teens and adults and 1,300 Canadian teens and adults from Ipsos’ online panel were interviewed online. With a sample of this size, the results are considered accurate to within ± 2.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had the entire U.S. and Canadian populations aged 12 and older been polled. The margin of error will be larger within sub-groupings of the survey population. The data was collected in a manner which ensures that the sample's age, gender and region composition reflects that of the actual U.S and Canada populations according to Census information. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.

Some 30 million Americans play, but
is there a secret formula to winning fantasy sports games?

EARLY ON A Friday evening in South Bend, Ind., Cory Albertson is
among the small subset of students on the University of Notre Dame campus not
prepping for a party, a date or both. At 29 years old, he is past his partying
phase—he even gave up beer as part of a gluten-free diet he recently adopted. A
graduate student in the business school, he is fixated on other, more lucrative
extracurricular activities. From a small table near the window in his
fourth-floor apartment, the Catholic school's iconic Golden Dome visible in the
distance, Albertson sits feeding numbers into tens of thousands of rows and
columns that populate a spreadsheet on his laptop. A Bob Marley remix plays
softly in the background.

With his close-cropped red hair, broad shoulders and easy grin,
Albertson seems plucked from the Fighting Irish recruiting catalog. He is
enjoying his return to campus life but increasingly finds it difficult to make
time for his classes. He considers it hard to believe, though more plausible by
the day, that the side business he started last year with $200 could actually
make him rich. Even more incredible: His business is playing fantasy sports.

Using tactics more familiar to a hedge-fund manager than to your
average sports enthusiast, Albertson is earning thousands of dollars almost
every day. One NFL Sunday, he took home more than $100,000. "It is like
securities trading," Albertson explains, "and athletes are the
commodities."

On this night, Albertson is making projections for how each
player will perform in the evening's professional basketball games—12 games,
involving a total of almost 300 players. It is painstaking, almost menial work.
As fuel for his calculations, Albertson imports statistics from the Web into a
complex algorithm he built over a period of months, and then tweaks the numbers
to reflect injury updates, matchups and other factors. He adjusts for
consistency—giving different weight to a player who scores 11 points almost
every game than to one who is prone to going off for 20 points one night and
recording a measly two points the next. He factors in potential fatigue if, for
example, a player had multiple games in recent days, and accounts for trends in
playing time.

Albertson also needs to ensure his information is up to the
minute. As he calibrates, he clicks back and forth between the spreadsheet and
his Twitter feed, where he pays special attention to the dispatches of the
newspaper beat reporters for the teams playing that night. "If someone
slips and falls in the locker room before the game, it's going to be the beat
reporter who knows it first," Albertson says.

It is 5:30 p.m., about an hour and a half before the first game
tips off. As Albertson speaks, Gordon Hayward, a Utah Jazz shooting guard, is
downgraded to doubtful for that night's game because of a bad hip. Albertson
adds the new information to the spreadsheet and updates the entry for Alec
Burks, Hayward's backup. If Hayward sits out, Burks is likely to get more
playing time. Eventually, Albertson punches the button to let the algorithm do
its work. The pinwheel turns and the laptop whirs as the machine cycles through
millions of calculations. Albertson waits.

More than 33 million Americans play fantasy sports, which has
mushroomed into a $3.3 billion industry and become the purest expression of our
sports-obsessed culture. (A primer for those whose interests run more toward
"Real Housewives" and "Glee": In fantasy sports, as the
name suggests, fans get to live out their dreams of owning and managing their
own teams. They pick real professional athletes to form a roster, and then
compete against other "owners" based on the statistical performance
of the chosen players. In this world, Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning
is a god.)

For most players—"addicts" may be a better
word—fantasy sports is a hobby, albeit one that consumes their weekends and
keeps them checking their smartphones in the middle of the night to get the
final stats from the late games. It is the bane of many a spouse's existence.

Albertson is in a completely different league. In between
attending business-school classes and cramming for exams, Albertson plays a new
high-volume variety of fantasy sports that allows him to compete in hundreds of
leagues each day. He may be the most consistently profitable fantasy sports
enthusiast in the country. And the reason is that to him, fantasy sports isn't
really about sports. It's about data. He doesn't trust his eyes to tell him who
the best players are; he only trusts the numbers, which tell him who is
overvalued and who is undervalued. Albertson's strategy is almost literally a
formula, and it bears little resemblance to casual fandom. "It's all about
having logical inputs that lead to logical outputs," he says.

The result of all this evening's research and effort is that
Albertson's algorithm determined the optimal lineup for a fantasy basketball
team. More precisely, on Albertson's command, it produced hundreds of lineups
that collectively represent a diverse portfolio that will, he hopes, generate
thousands of dollars in profits by the end of the night's games, in about six
hours.

He doesn't make money every night, and in fact ends up in the
red on a regular basis. But he wins more than he loses, the benchmark all good
traders strive to meet. Last year, Albertson took home more than $200,000. This
year, he projects his business will make almost a million dollars.

THE MONEY IS burning a hole in Albertson's pocket. On a snowy Chicago
afternoon, he folds his 6-foot-5 frame into the driver's seat of a white Tesla
Model S for a test drive. The salesman launches into his spiel for the $110,000
electric sedan as Albertson zips through the sludge of a side street and toward
the wide open lanes of Interstate 90. "This is awesome, man. It's like
driving a spaceship," Albertson mutters.

There is little about him, including the rented Hyundai039010.KQ +1.96%he parked outside the
dealership a few minutes earlier, to suggest he can afford to drop six figures
on a car. You can hardly blame the salesman for asking: "What kind of
business are you in?" Albertson guns it off the freeway entrance ramp,
pushing the speedometer past 85 and the electric car toward the Windy City
skyline in the distance. "I'm self-employed," he says. "I have a
fantasy sports business." The salesman, not surprisingly, says most of his
buddies are into fantasy sports. But he appears troubled by one thing.
"Isn't that sorta like gambling?" he asks.

Albertson hates that question—"I take it as an
insult," he tells me later—but he hears it all the time, from classmates,
prospective girlfriends and his parents. Albertson grew up in Warsaw, Ind., as
part of a conservative, blue-collar family in which his father worked for an
orthopedic-device manufacturer and his mother stayed home. He attended Ball
State University, where he studied criminal justice, for a time anyway. When he
started college, in 2004, the online-poker boom was in full roar and he spent
as much time on the virtual felt as he did studying. But like a small number of
online-poker aficionados, he was drawn more to the game's analytical components
than to the gambling rush it provided. He became fascinated by data and its
applications, keeping detailed records on his opponents and studying the
mathematically correct choice in thousands of possible situations that can
arise in a poker game.

Albertson doesn't like to gamble and says he hopes to never set
foot in another casino. He is a health nut who practices yoga and is traveling
to Haiti this summer to help train small-business owners. It pains him that
anyone, much less his parents, might see him as some sort of degenerate.
"They are pretty religious. To say we come from different worlds now would
be an understatement. I think they worry a lot," he says.

Last year, Albertson saw a chance to return to mainstream
culture. He applied and was admitted to Notre Dame's business school, where as
part of the orientation he was required to take a career aptitude test. The
software was astute: It said he should become a securities trader. As it
happens, Albertson had recently been approached by an old poker buddy, a
Chicago native named Taylor Caby, who was starting a fantasy sports website.
Caby needed players to populate the games on his site and offered Albertson a
rebate on some of his entry fees if he would try his hand at a few contests.

Albertson concluded that fantasy sports was like poker—a contest
dominated in the long run by skill, not luck. He teamed up with a friend from
the poker circuit, Ray Coburn of Jackson, N.J., to build the algorithm. Each
man put in about $200, they recall. But they made a key observation early: With
its use of vast reams of historical data, fantasy sports is similar to
stock-market investing. And much like the top investors, they decided the way
to get the most consistent results was to take as much chance out of the
equation as possible. "It felt like a problem we could solve," Coburn
says.

Instead of coming up with one ideal lineup, they built a system
that designed a range of lineups that would create profits under a variety of
scenarios. Sure, Peyton Manning may be the best play, but what if he gets hurt,
or has a bad game? Better not to have Manning in every lineup. In investing
terms, they opted for a diversified portfolio rather than a concentrated bet.

“

Albertson
concluded that fantasy sports was like poker—a contest dominated in the long
run by skill, not luck.

”

Until very recently, it wasn't possible to make a living playing
fantasy sports. A league can be free, with only bragging rights on the line,
but typically each owner puts up a modest entry fee, with the winner collecting
the bulk of the prize pool at the end of the season. Given that the seasons for
professional sports leagues last anywhere from four to seven months, the payout
on an hourly basis for the average fantasy league doesn't even come close to
the minimum wage. Albertson plays a new, faster version called daily fantasy,
which compresses the typical season-long fantasy league into a single day. So,
for example, instead of drafting a baseball team for the season and tracking
the players over the course of six months and 162 games, a daily fantasy
contest is decided based on who can pick the best players for a single night's
worth of games. The people who drafted a traditional fantasy baseball team this
March won't know the outcome of the league until the end of September. In daily
fantasy, people can draft a team on any morning of the week and know the
outcome by the end of the night—and then start over again the next day.

This version of the game popped up about five years ago, and a
handful of startups have since drawn more than $100 million in venture capital.
Comcast Ventures, the venture-capital arm of the cable conglomerate, is one of
the backers of

FanDuel, the biggest daily fantasy site at the moment. Barry
Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorpIACI -0.55%put money into a site
called DraftStreet. Daily fantasy "only really hit the mainstream in about
the last 18 months," says Paul Charchian, chairman of the Fantasy Sports
Trade Association. "Charch," as he's known, says there has been more
venture capital and other investor money allocated to daily fantasy websites in
the past few years than in the history of fantasy sports. The appeal for
players is twofold, he says: For one thing, many people simply like the shorter
time frame. But it also provides a way for serious players to make big money.
In traditional fantasy, people didn't try to make a living on it, because
"it took too long getting a return on your money," Charchian says.

Daily fantasy's emergence also coincides with the rise of sports
analytics, a once-obscure, nerd-populated corner of the sports world that has
revolutionized the industry in recent years. The trend got perhaps its most
mainstream exposure with the Michael Lewis book (and subsequent movie starring
Brad Pitt) "Moneyball," which showed how the Oakland Athletics
baseball team used statistics to rigorously measure players, upending much of
the conventional wisdom about the game. (The Boston Red Sox also embraced analytics, and
the team won the World Series in 2013, its third championship
in a decade.) But analytics have now been fully embraced by fans as well. In 2006,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started an annual event, called the
Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which drew less than 200 people in its first
year. ESPN columnist Bill Simmons dubbed it Dorkapalooza. This year, it drew
nearly 3,000 attendees and sold out more than two months in advance.

Not surprisingly, gamblers are also embracing analytics. The
winner of the Las Vegas Hilton's SuperContest, the most prestigious
sports-betting event of the year, in which each participant picks five NFL games
each week, was David Frohardt-Lane, who has a graduate degree in statistics
from the University of Chicago and for eight years ran the equities desk at
Getco, a multibillion-dollar investment firm that has since merged with Knight CapitalKCG -0.33%to form KCG Holdings.
His prize for winning the SuperContest: more than half a million dollars.

The man many consider the most successful basketball bettor in
the world, a Canadian named Haralabos Voulgaris, compiles vast quantities of
data and has a team of assistants to analyze NBA games. Voulgaris reportedly
makes millions of dollars each year but declined to speak to WSJ.Money about
his methodology.

Sports gambling is illegal in most of the country, and the top
officials of the major sports leagues routinely denounce any suggestion of
expanding sports betting. Fantasy sports, however, is legal in all but five
states, and the leagues love it—they say it drives television viewership and
overall engagement among fans, without introducing the unsavory aspects of
full-fledged gambling. This is one reason why many analysts and investors think
the daily fantasy industry is poised to explode, and why the sites that offer
the games are aggressively marketing on sports radio and other mainstream
outlets. Andrew Wiggins, a friend of Albertson's and the founder of
Chicago-based DraftDay,
a daily fantasy site, says the future of the industry is based on attracting
casual fans. "If this is going to get huge, we need the guys who are going
to buy in for $20. They do it for fun," Wiggins says. But if that happens,
number-crunching sharks like Albertson will be lying in wait. If casual players
embrace daily fantasy in bigger numbers, Albertson says, "then we'll
really be a printing press."

A FEW HOURS after the Tesla test drive, sitting about 20 rows from
the court at Chicago's United Center and munching on a gluten-free hot dog,
Albertson asks a question that is on no one else's mind in the arena: "How
come D.J. Augustin is not in the game?"

The Chicago Bulls are playing the Philadelphia 76ers in a
meaningless midseason game, and as the first quarter draws to a close, Augustin
is sitting on the bench. Augustin until recently was almost washed up in
professional basketball. At age 26, he had been cut by three teams before
latching on with the Bulls when the team's starting point guard, Derrick Rose,
went down with a knee injury. The Bulls also had recently traded their best
remaining player, Luol Deng, in a move that most fans interpreted as raising
the white flag on the season.

Albertson—or, rather, his algorithm—sees Augustin's stock
beginning to rise. On this night, it identifies Augustin as one of its top picks,
even though the player was chosen by only 2.4 percent of Albertson's
competitors in one of his biggest contests. And the algorithm is right.

Augustin comes into the game late in the first quarter and goes
on to lead the Bulls to a 103-78 victory. More important to Albertson, Augustin
fills up the stat sheet, finishing with a total of 19 points, eight assists,
three steals and four rebounds. Albertson and Coburn's business ends the night
with a nice profit—almost $9,000. The algorithm isn't right all the time, and
even loses money on many nights. But Albertson says he is thinking of pursuing
investors, so he can invest outside money as well as his own—sort of like a
fantasy sports hedge fund. "It's a big enough sample size, there is
clearly something to it," says Albertson. "It's not going to be
perfect, but it can be pretty damn good."

The special FSTA room rate for the June 17-18 event in San Francisco is $199/night.

Reserve your room by clicking here. If you prefer to make your room reservation by phone, call 415-398-8900 and ask for the special FSTA conference rate.

Click here to register and get more details about the conference. You can also review the conference agenda here.

Sponsorship opportunities are still available. Check out the different packages here or contact FSTA Association Director Megan Van Petten at megan@fsta.org or 312-771-7019 for more info.

Again, click here to register for the FSTA Summer Conference sponsored by Optimal Paymentsand we look forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

]]>Tue, 27 May 2014 19:25:34 GMT247Drafts.com joins Open Gaming Sports Networkhttp://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=171649
http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=171649The Open Gaming Fantasy Sports Network offers free and pay-to-play fantasy contests over short durations such as a day, a week or a playoff period. It offers operators complete flexibility to create leagues for any sport with custom scoring methods and draft types.

“We are excited to have come to an agreement with Sports Rev Holdings,” said Chris Wright, CEO of OGSN. “They are a passionate group of dedicated sports fans that will bring a lot of energy to the industry.”

247Drafts.com joins other network sites in providing shared player liquidity and guaranteed prize pools. The network model allows for multiple operators to share costs such as infrastructure, software and support services while offering their customers a wider option of fantasy leagues and prizes.

“Our goal is to offer our customers a clean interface, a variety of fantasy leagues, good competition and exceptional customer service,” said Sports Rev Holdings spokesman Scott Urbanoski. “We feel that OGSN was our best option to not only provide these services but also get to market quickly. 247Drafts.com is looking forward to working with OGSN to drive innovation in the daily fantasy sports industry.”

Open Gaming Sports Network uses software provided by Open Gaming Solutions Inc. to power their network of independent fantasy sports operators. OGSN provides all of the tools necessary for operators to run a successful fantasy sports business.]]>Tue, 6 May 2014 00:39:15 GMTMajor League Baseball Reverses Course; Now Fully Endorses Daily Fantasy Sportshttp://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=166603
http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=166603Originally published on Forbes.com

That quote seemed to provide a dagger to the heart of some upstart daily fantasy sports contests. If the act of winning a daily fantasy sports contest were truly no different from a flip of the coin, daily fantasy sports would violate not only federal law, but also the law of all fifty states.

Nevertheless, just one year after Robert Bowman’s famous quote, Major League Baseball seems to have backtracked on its opposition to daily fantasy sports — now even endorsing one daily fantasy sports website.

Bud Selig begins his final year as Major League Baseball commissioner with a far more tolerant view toward daily fantasy sports. (Photo credit: bkabak)

Although this MLB.com article (or, perhaps better phrased, advertisement) purports to limit Major League Baseball’s endorsement of daily fantasy sports to just free games, in reality, any attempt to differentiate the two, based on the nature of daily fantasy websites, is largely dubious.

Today’s news coming from MLB.com is thus very positive not only for DraftKings, but also for the many other players in the daily fantasy sports marketplace, including the dominant market leader, FanDuel.

Of course, the ultimate legal status of daily fantasy sports contests are not one for sports leagues such as Major League Baseball to decide. Even with the blessing of this most powerful professional sports league, daily fantasy sports contests still need to ensure their games comply withthe many complicated requirements under both federal and state law.

Thus, even with today’s news of Major League Baseball’s support for daily fantasy sports, the companies that operate in this marketplace still need to stay abreast of both federal and state laws, and they must continue to keep their games out of at least the eight to ten highest risk states.

In addition, he is an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School, and a legal consultant on sports, antitrust, gaming and intellectual property matters. Nothing contained in this article should be construed as legal advice.

Win at Fantasy Baseball, the Old-School Way

Dominate your draft using classic strategies from guys who shaped the game

MARCH 13, 2014

Through 2013, the

fantasy sports industry has blossomed into a multibillion-dollar business. In the U.S. alone, 33.5 million people throw down cash on their fake rosters of athletes, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Fantasy baseball in particular is a lucrative, agonizing, time-sucking, and highly entertaining activity—and you might have a former U.S. President to thank for it.

John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball, recently posited that a fantasy baseball season was played as early as 1871 by a teenage Woodrow Wilson. The future Commander in Chief compiled made-up stats for real players in the National Association. The ink-on-paper records are even archived in the Library of Congress.

Another early fantasy acolyte: Future On the Road author Jack Kerouac. According to Isaac Gewirtz, Ph.D., curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, Kerouac devised a complex baseball game as a teenager that he would go on to play for most of his adult life. In its later iterations, the game made use of a deck of cards; simulations, like hurling objects at a game board; and most importantly, a statistical system that decided the outcome of every pitch. Unlike Wilson’s pastime, Kerouac’s featured both fictional players and stats.

Wilson’s and Kerouac’s games smack of a more modern precursor to online play, Strat-O-Matic, a Dungeons & Dragons-like dice-rolling game for baseball nerds that caught on between the 1960s and ‘80s. Both also have shades of Rotisserie League Baseball, invented by a group of sports journalists in the early ‘80s, which anointed players “fantasy owners” and created a still-widely-used points system.

Then fantasy baseball started to shift toward digital with the advent of 1989’s Dugout Derby, a newspaper promotion executed by a company cofounded by Brad Wendkos. The game, Wendkos says, was fueled by technology that “made the telephone a remote keypad to a computer.” Dugout Derby players would call in to join leagues, draft a team based on a Phoneworks’ algorithms, and accrue weekly stats, according to Wendkos. A non-baseball fan, he quickly got hooked. “It was addictive,” he says.

Then came the breakthrough. In the early ’90s, developers at IBM produced what would be the first online fantasy game,Baseball Manager, which original tech-team member Rick Wolf remembers as attempting to “take Rotisserie Baseball and smash it into Strat-O-Matic.” (He thinks it worked.) Taking into account more in-game simulation than Rotisserie, it allowed you to set lineups and rotations nightly, just like you can nowadays, Wolf says. The exception? You couldn’t get fantasy results in real-time, because of slower modem speeds.

Once the Internet caught fire, the sky was the limit—all of these disparate early versions and their positive quirks connected into one system, Voltron-style. The current version that consumes your mornings, days, and nights is the result of great strides in technological advancement.

But while futuristic tech has simplified the game for you as a fantasy owner, one could also argue that it’s dumbed things down a bit, too. So we consulted with a diverse panel of fantasy baseball experts about old-school strategy in advance of your big draft day. Prepare with these five classic tips, and dominate your league this season.

1. Tap Your Local Library and Newspaper

Before the Internet, how do you think fantasy players did their research? These were two places you scoured for an edge on your competitors. “I remember dozens and dozens of lunches spent at the library to get [information from] local papers,” Wendkos says. Veteran sports beat writers in MLB cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland report on their teams daily, so following their lead could help you nab an early call-up or an under-the-radar waiver-wire pickup during the season. Best of all, libraries carry multiple national newspapers—and the last time we checked, access was free.

2. Think Like an Accountant

Ray Guilfoyle, managing editor of SB Nation’s fantasy site,FakeTeams, got his start and still plays in auction leagues, which tab each baseball player with a dollar value and provide managers with a limited budget to spend on their roster. In these leagues, owners have to double as accountants, using money management skills in drafting a team. Sure, the higher-dollar players—like the Angels’ Mike Trout or Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw—will still go in early rounds on draft day. But if you blow your wad on five pricey players up front, you won’t have enough to spend on support positions in later rounds. “It’s closer to managing an actual Major League Baseball team,” says Guilfoyle. Maybe it’s time to get your Steinbrenner on.

3. Don’t Go it Alone

Wolf, now president of FantasyAlarm, explains that back in the day, “all we had was the [fantasy] community” and resources like Web-based bulletin boards to discuss advanced strategy. You now have access to thousands of fantasy experts and fellow junkies on social platforms like Twitter and Facebook—not to mention dork-tastic analytical hubs like FanGraphs(a favorite of Guilfoyle’s), and up-to-the-minute news on cable channels like MLB Network and ESPN. Think of all of these great resources as one, giant “bulletin board.” If you’re wondering whether to drop Albert Pujols by midseason, you can literally ask the experts for their advice.

4. Keep an Eye on Statistical Trends

Simple math could equal giant results. Wolf does “an enormous amount of numerical analysis” in advance of his drafts to figure out which players are going to break out each year. Grab a pencil and paper and make note. In 2013, by looking at stats over a period of years and factoring in potential areas of improvement, Wolf successfully drafted Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis, who went from 33 HRs and 85 RBIs in 2012 to 53 HRs and 138 RBIs in 2013, per Baseball-Reference. In short, simple trend-analysis goes a long way. Wolf has a new player tabbed for greatness in 2014: Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Starling Marte. (Thank him later.)

5. Watch Actual Baseball!

Lastly, in an old-school world, televised games and the ballfield were the two other places you’d execute your research. Former MLB pitcher and current Arizona Diamondbacks broadcaster Tom Candiotti uses what he calls “the eyeball test” for drafting diamonds in the rough for his fantasy team. Last season, he watched Milwaukee Brewers prospect Jean Segura play in an early game, and saw potential: “I immediately put him on my fantasy team; nobody knew who he was,” remembers Candiotti. (In 2013, Segura batted .294 with 49 RBIs and 44 SBs.) In terms of 2014 breakouts, Candiotti, who gets a lot of his info directly from scouts, says he has his eye on D-Backs pitching prospect Archie Bradley. “This guy’s stuff is off the charts,” he says. You heard it from the source.

Woodrow Wilson: The First Fantasy Baseball Player

Thomas Woodrow Wilson, ca. 1875

Yes, it’s a provocative title but a startling new find has me believing it’s true. Like the protagonist in Robert Coover’s 1968 novelThe Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., the 14-year-old Thomas Woodrow Wilson—known as Tommy—created a whole universe of players, statistics, and a pennant race, with or without the aid of dice. But unlike Waugh—who invented a table game using three dice, a “Stress Chart,” and an “Extraordinary Occurrences Chart”—the young Wilson did not create players or teams. He used only the cast of characters in the real-life National Association of 1871, which he surely read about in the sporting weeklies. And now, from deep in the archives of the Library of Congress, we have come upon Tommy Wilson’s complete handwritten record of that fantasy season. George Wright, Al Spalding, and Cap Anson cavort on an imaginary field, along with all the other worthies of that first year of professional league play.

How do we think of Woodrow Wilson today? Professorial, idealistic, sickly—the President of Princeton University, he became the nation’s 28th President in 1913. He promised us peace but took us into war “to make the world safe for democracy.” We recall his Fourteen Points and his belief in the League of Nations; some will reflect on his Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918. We think of his stroke in October 1919 that largely incapacitated him for the last year of his Presidency, when his second wife, Edith, whom he had married in 1915, sort of ran the White House; this scenario gave rise to the 25th Amendment, regarding the disability of a President.

Light Foot Base Ball Club, 1870

But Tommy Wilson was not a sickly or especially bookish lad. Born December 28, 1856 in Staunton, Virginia, he and his family moved to Augusta, Georgia one year later. In 1870, Wilson organized the Light Foot Club for “various secret, mysterious and adventurous purposes,” including a baseball team for which he played second base. (In 1873 he went on to Davidson College, where he played on the varsity baseball team.)

Wilson recorded the starting lineup of the Light Foot Base Ball Club in his copy of Elements of Physical Geography. These ninth-grade textbook doodlings have been preserved, along with a list of racehorses “arranged by age and speed.” One year later, before moving from Augusta to Columbia, South Carolina, he went from listmaker to perhaps the inventor of fantasy baseball. Here’s the previously untold story.

On October 29, 2013 Amber Paranick wrote to the Baseball Hall of Fame:

I’m a reference librarian at the Library of Congress and have, along with a colleague, discovered a rare item in the Woodrow Wilson Collection. It appears to be a hand-written newspaper, entitled “Professional Record” for 1871. As far as I can tell, a serial publication with this title was not in existence in 1871. Can I ask for your advice? Do you know of a publication with this title that related to baseball?…

Ms. Paranick supplied a scan of the first page of the “newspaper.” Jim Gates was unable to locate anything that matched it but suggested that she contact early-baseball experts Tom Shieber, Peter Mancuso, and myself. With their concurrence, I followed up.

Some quick internet sleuthing turned up evidence of the sale of a manuscript, much like the one described at Parke-Bernet Galleries (today’s Sotheby’s), on May 14, 1946. In its description of Lot 58, the auction house attributed the manuscript to Henry Chadwick, but while he did provide year-end summaries to the New York Clipper and other outlets, he is clearly not the author of this work. Not only is the name of the purported publisher, sporting goods merchant E.I. Horsman, misspelled–Horsman went on to win greater fame as a manufacturer of dolls and toys, and coined the term “Teddy Bear”–but so is the first word of the title (“Proffessional”). Tommy Wilson copied the Chadwick format and puffed up his own commercial prospects, including a 200,000 print run. From the catalog:

58. BASEBALL. HENRY CHADWICK. AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT of “Professional Baseball Record for 1871. Price 25cts. Published by E. I. Horse­man.” Closely written on 17 small 4to pages.

A MOST INTERESTING AND UNIQUE ITEM BY “THE FATHER OF BASEBALL,” written while Chadwick was Chairman of the National Association of Base Ball Players. The manuscript is a record of a tour made by the teams in the season of 1871, and gives the names of the teams, where played, names of the players, and the results of the games, in all about 139 games, with the box score of each game, and with the batting and fielding records of the players. The teams included the Bostons of Boston; the Eckfords of Brooklyn; the Athletics of Philadelphia; Forest City of Cleveland, Olympics of Washington, etc.

The introduction to the manuscript reads: “All are familiar with New Championship Rules, and perusing these few Games all of which were for the Professional Championship of the Country it will be seen readily who are or ought to be Champions of the United States…” [Emphasis mine—JT.] The manuscript is written in a microscopic hand, and shows a number of corrections by the author.

Parke-Bernet Galleries, May 14, 1946

Who purchased this manuscript back in 1946? I have no clue, but somehow it made its way to the Woodrow Wilson Collection at the Library of Congress.

Claire Dekle from the Library’s Preservation Department was able to procure images of the entire “Proffessional Record” for me, and then the real fun began. Wilson’s recording of detail was thorough in the extreme—not only in the presentation of box scores but also in the clubs’ year-end summaries, which split out earned runs scored and allowed and detail individual batting and fielding totals and averages in the manner of the day. (I offer low-resolution images here to permit reasonable download times.) This was the record of a magical mystery tour, played between the young Wilson’s ears.

Rockford FC vs. Olympic of DC, June 30.

What first alerted me to the utter fantasy of the statistics was chancing upon a game Wilson created for June 30, 1871 between the Forest City of Rockford, Illinois and the Olympics of Washington, DC. Not only does Anson hit a home run for Rockford (in the real 1871 season he hit none) but pitcher Cherokee Fisher tosses a no-hitter, in which the only opponents to reach first base do so through errors. This would be professional baseball’s first no-hitter, and nearly a perfect game … except that it never happened.

I believe Wilson commenced his work here in March-April of 1871. The National Association (NA) was formed on March 17 in a meeting at Collier’s Saloon in New York at Broadway and 13th Street. Of the ten clubs represented at that meeting, eight plunked down their $10 entrance fee. The Eckfords and Atlantics, however, who were thought certain to be original members, demurred, preferring to play independent of the new circuit. In the days that followed a surprising ninth club entered the NA: the Kekionga of Fort Wayne. In his proprietary league, Wilson includes all eleven clubs, and even some players who, as holdovers from their 1870 clubs, were thought to have renewed for 1871, but were released or quit.

The actual 1871 NA champion Athletics of Philadelphia (21-7) finished in Wilsonia with a ho-hum record of 11-16, scoring 178 runs while allowing 176. Their top batter was Al Reach, with an AVG of 1 .00 runs per game while registering 3.6153 outs per game.

The Chicago White Stockings, who lost the NA flag in a final-game contest with the Athletics, fared well in Wilsonia, at 16-11. Their leading batsman was the otherwise obscure Ed Pinkham, at 1.1166 runs per game (the extra decimal places are Wilson’s not mine).

The Boston Red Stockings, third-place finishers in the real NA with a mark of 20-10, disappointed in Wilson’s World, at 10-15 while being outscored 209-176. George Wright, limited by injury to playing in only 16 real-life games, was healthy enough to play in all but three of Wilson’s imagined Boston games.

The Brooklyn Atlantics, who did not compete in the NA of 1871, won 16 and lost 6, outscoring their opponents 183-111. Among Wilson’s players were the perhaps mysterious Coffey, Munn, Bunting, and Carney. None of these men played on the Atlantic Club in the NA of 1872, although Horatio Munn (whose first name had gone undiscovered for more than a century) did appear in a single game in 1875. The other three did in fact open the 1871 season with the Atlantic nine of 1871, reconstituted as an independent. Left fielder Jack McDonald was their leading batsman, with a Runs Per Game Average of 1.1428. (Computing the Batting Average as we do today, using hits as th enumerator and at bats as the denominator rather than runs/games, did not come into practice until a few years later.)

Carney, Coffey, Bunting, 1871 Atlantics

The non-NA Eckfords went 12-15, being outscored 263-253. When they actually entered the circuit the following year, they registered a won-lost mark of 3-26. Among the obscure players Wilson included were Josh (Jim) Snyder, later of the 1872 Eckford, and Eddie Shelly, a former Union of Morrisania player who in fact joined the Eckfords in 1871 but never played for an NA club and thus is not in the encyclopedic record.

Wilson’s Forest City of Rockford went 15-12, scoring more runs than they allowed. In fact the club finished last in the NA at 4-21 and folded before season’s end. Anson, in his freshman year as a professional, went on to play four years with the Athletics before landing for good in Chicago.

Wilson’s Cleveland Forest City went 11-13, better than its actual mark of 10-19. Non-NA players who sent me scurrying to establish identities were substitutes Smith, Clark, and Hanna. Peter Morris wrote of the man who I suspect to be the last named: “The umpire of this noteworthy game was a man who was making his only appearance on a major league diamond. Identified in game accounts only as ‘Doc’ Hanna,’ his name still appears in some listings of major league umpires as ‘Dr. Hanna.’ In fact, the now-forgotten Leonard C. ‘Doc’ Hanna….” [http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/bc8cc834] Smith is presumably A.J. “Pikey” Smith, former captain of the amateur Cleveland Forest City of the 1860s. Clark is presumably the president of the 1867 club.

As to the Kekionga Club of Fort Wayne, which I covered in depth in Baseball in the Garden of Eden,they were terrors in Tommy Wilson’s Eden, going 16-9 while shortstop Wally Goldsmith terrorized pitchers to the tune of 1.2608 runs per game. The unknown name (to me at least) on the fantasy roster was Chenowith, but he turned out to be Bill Chenoweth, who had played with the Pastimes of Baltimore in 1870, which provided later NA players George Popplein and Frank Williams (who played as Sellman with the Kekiongas in their only NA season).

Wilson’s Olympics of Washington (in the true NA, 15-15) went 11-16, being outscored 239-179. Their leading batsman was right fielder John Glenn, at 0.9565 R/G. He would become notorious in the game’s annals for allegedly attacking a twelve-year-old girl and then being shot by a policeman trying to protect him from a lynch mob.

Haymakers vs. Red Stockings.

The Unions of Lansingburgh (a.k.a. Troy Haymakers) went 11-14 for Woodrow Wilson, outscoring opponents 197-196. Esteban Bellan, baseball’s first player of Hispanic birth, had the top batting mark with 1.0400. In Wilson’s “newspaper” a Penfield plays for Troy, though he was not on the 1871 roster. He had played with the Haymakers in previous years. George Ewell appears as a sub though he too did not play with Troy in 1871, instead playing one game with Cleveland in 1871.

Wilson’s New York Mutuals went 11-13 and were outscored 167-152. Their leading hitter was third baseman Charley Smith, who had been a star with the great Atlantics clubs of the 1860s but left the Mutuals midway in 1871 after suffering a mental breakdown. Wilson’s “unknown” Mutual substitute is “McMahone.” Surely this is Billy McMahon, who played for the Mutes from 1859-70 and then opened a notorious Tenderloin saloon called at first “The Argyle Rooms” and later “The Haymarket” at Sixth Avenue and 30th Street. ]]>Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:00:09 GMTMAJOR STORM BREWING BETWEEN FANTASY SPORTS GIANTS: FANDUEL VS. DRAFTKINGShttp://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=164887
http://www.fsta.org/news/news.asp?id=164887

Published on Forbes.com (3/13/14)

Written by Darren Heitner

FanDuel’s lawyers are currently drafting a demand letter to be sent to its main daily fantasy sports competitor DraftKings. The demand letter will explain FanDuel’s displeasure with DraftKings’ advertisements, specifically the language contained within those ads that reference the company’s dominance within the rapidly expanding daily fantasy gaming sector of a larger fantasy sports industry. Current plans involve the inclusion of a firm deadline by which DraftKings must take down what FanDuelbelieves to be false and/or misleading information contained within said advertisements. The alternative will be the filing of a lawsuit.

In the past, daily fantasy sports games have had to respond toquestions concerning the legality of their services. Now, two of the largest daily fantasy sports operators may be involved in a fight surrounding claims made about their positioning within the highly competitive sector.

According to a document signed by FanDuel Inc. CEO Nigel Eccles and received by FORBES, FanDuel’s lifetime registrations from 2009 through December 2013 was 768,728 and the service’s lifetime unique depositors (users who have made at least one deposit on the site) during that time was 288,449. FanDuel’s 2013 revenue (entry fees minus prizes) for the month of December was $2,840,309. Based on these numbers and a claimed “really good idea of where they are in comparison with us,” FanDuel is ready to take action against DraftKings for advertisements that include language like “DraftKings is the #1 destination for daily fantasy sports on the internet.”

DraftKings claims to be the #1 destination for daily fantasy sports on the internet. Screenshot from its homepage.

“We are not just saying you should take this down; we are saying you really need to take this down or we’ll sue you,” said an executive at FanDuel to FORBES.

FanDuel says that it has had people taking snapshot after snapshot of DraftKings’ lobby, which is open to the public. It claims that it can get a sufficient estimate within a few percentage points of key statistics about DraftKings’ user base from those screenshots alone.

“We have a really good idea of where they are in comparison with us,” said the FanDuel executive. ”They say they are neck and neck, and sometimes larger than us. As the space gets larger and larger, we can’t have an entity saying it is the leader when it is not.”

Femi Wasserman, Vice President at DraftKings, Inc. seems to be confused as to what FanDuel’s claim may be. ”We typically use verbiage that says ‘a leading provider,’ so I’m not sure what FanDuel is reacting to,” said Wasserman to FORBES. ”We would have to know more about what is driving the concern, so we have no comment until such time as we have more information.”

FanDuel has taken notice of DraftKings’ exorbitant raise of capital and its use of same. It believes that DraftKings has spent about $12 million in advertising last year, with the majority of its spend focused on the NFL season. FanDuel is 100% positive that DraftKings spent at least double what FanDuel spent on TV advertising in 2013. Yet, FanDuel is also convinced that there exists a wide gap between the two daily fantasy sports operators.

“They know they’re not close to us, but they won’t want to release numbers,” explained the FanDuel executive. ”Perception is something people pay attention to. It is something Nigel [Eccles] wants to tackle.” FanDuel’s CEO has thus put his attorneys to work. If DraftKings does not comply with FanDuel’s demands, then we may witness a heavyweight fight between daily fantasy sports giants.

Dinkmeyer, who's 31 and got married last year, said he earns about as much from competing in daily fantasy sports leagues as he did when he was researching international equities and domestic small- and mid-cap stocks at CapTrust Financial Advisers.

A former tennis player at Dartmouth College, Dinkmeyer is part of the fastest-growing segment in fantasy sports, which in 2012 had participants spend $3.38 billion on products, services and entry fees, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Daily-play continues to grow while traditional season-long leagues have ended with the start of the National Football League playoffs.

"It's exploded in the last couple of years," association President Paul Charchian said in a telephone interview from Minneapolis. "It's growing so fast by the time we get the research back, it's already out of date. It's gotten more investment in the past two years than in the history of fantasy sports combined."

DraftKings, the Boston-based organizer of daily fantasy play in baseball, football, basketball and hockey, in November completed an additional $24 million round of funding led by Redpoint Ventures to help it expand. Comcast Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of NBC network parent company Comcast, early in 2013 was part of a group that invested $11 million in FanDuel, which is now averaging more than $6 million in weekly payouts.

The last few weeks of the NFL's regular season, with the majority of season-long fantasy participants out of contention unless they reached their league's playoffs or championship round, further boosted the popularity of daily-play websites for cash. They remain popular in the postseason and as the National Basketball Association approaches the midway point of its regular season, offering head-to-head competition, leagues ranging in size from three to 20-or-more participants or tournaments with thousands of entries.

Fantasy sports, in which participants draft teams of players whose success is determined by the statistics they generate, dates to the 1980s. More than 33.5 million people now play fantasy sports in the U.S., according to the trade association, with leagues based on the NFL far outpacing Major League Baseball as the most popular. Fantasy sports are gaining popularity outside the U.S. also, with leagues for soccer and cricket.

DraftKings' revenue increased 10-fold in the past year, Chief Executive Officer Jason Robins said. Two weeks ago, the company awarded a $1 million prize in its fantasy football grand final. Participants could gain entry by winning a qualifying tournament with an entry fee as low as $2.

Three weeks ago, FanDuel held its premier fantasy football event in Las Vegas, where Travis Spieth, a sales manager for a CBS and Fox television affiliate in Sioux City, Iowa, won $1 million from an initial first-time investment of $10. Spieth won the top prize thanks to a touchdown run by Denver Broncos running back Montee Ball and field goal by Nick Novak of the San Diego Chargers that vaulted him from eighth place.

"It was a surreal experience," said Spieth, 37, adding that he's played in season-long fantasy sports leagues with friends for about 15 years. "I like the regular fantasy leagues, but if your team has an injury, it might cost you your season. With the daily-play, there's more strategy."

Average fantasy sports players are in their mid-40s, according to FanDuel Chief Executive Nigel Eccles, who said he hadn't seen much innovation in the industry when he helped start the company in 2009. Eccles said when sports fans in their 20s were asked why they didn't play fantasy sports, the most common response was that it took too long — with baseball season stretching seven months to determine a winner.

"We thought, 'OK, great market, lack of innovation and also really weird that this younger group is not coming in. Why don't we take something that people love and make it faster?'" Eccles, 39, said in an interview from his New York office. "That was really the genesis of the idea, which is: How do we make every day draft day? Everybody says the best day of the year is draft day. That really was the product."

According to FanDuel, 57 percent of its participants range from 21 to 35. A banner on the company's wall in a chrome and wood space in downtown Manhattan features a time line of FanDuel's rapid growth and highlights that $150 million in prizes were awarded in 2013, up from $50 million in 2012.

DraftStreet, DraftDay and FanEx are among other daily fantasy sports websites in the market which Robins, the DraftKings CEO, says caters to the large segment of society that seeks instant gratification.

"It wasn't like we were coming in to try to displace an existing market," Robins, 33, said. "We were coming in and trying to convince people who were already passionate about this to participate in a different way from their season-long leagues."

Daily fantasy sports websites are legal, considered games of skill rather than illegal games of chance, according to operators. In October, a district court in Illinois dismissed a lawsuit against FanDuel seeking to strip away a contestant's winnings. The court also concluded FanDuel is the operator of an online gaming site rather than a gambling "winner" based on the Illinois Loss Recovery Act.

Dinkmeyer, who in June left his position with CapTrust, an institutional investment consulting firm, says his job in fantasy sports can be difficult to explain to people he meets at dinner parties.

"The first question is, 'Oh, so you're a professional gambler?'" Dinkmeyer said by telephone. "I try to draw the distinction because in our industry we're very sensitive about daily fantasy sports being completely legal where online poker right now isn't in most places. It's very similar to anybody doing day-trading in that any single day can be really bad, but over the long term you enhance the sample sizes and if you do have skill, it usually will show up."

Dinkmeyer espouses the value of smart money management and shares advice on that and other fantasy sports topics at websites such as Rotoexperts.com and MyFantasyFix as well as on a Sirius XM Fantasy Radio show he hosts. Dinkmeyer said he changed his approach after initially losing money while betting his entire bankroll every day.

"Over time, I just kept having success, the results became more significant," he said. "Then you look down and at the end of the year you say this money is somewhat equivalent to what I made in my finance job. Then you do that two years in a row and you say, 'Maybe this is sustainable.'"

He wouldn't say how much he makes from fantasy. A senior investment analyst with seven years of experience working in the Tampa area would have an average base pay of about $65,800 and their total cash compensation — not including equity or benefits _would be about $85,600, according to PayScale.com.

Daily fantasy sites are now in "land grab" mode, said the trade association's Charchian, investing heavily in marketing and commercials aimed at gaining new users. Sports websites such as ESPN.com, Yahoo.com and CBSSports.com — among the biggest names in traditional fantasy sports — have so far stayed out of paid daily-play market, where FanDuel estimates that it currently has about 70 percent of paid users.

"It certainly is in a very high growth period; it's also a very competitive market," FanDuel's Eccles said. "We used to have a spreadsheet of our competitors and gave up at 40. There have been so many people who have tried to innovate on fantasy sports and this is the one innovation that has really stuck and taken off."